Overture Bid Tool Gone - Know a Good&nbspAlternative?

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It appears that the overture bid tool is finally gone (for real this time). The information from this tool is used in our own Keyword Difficulty Tool, so now I'm looking for an alternate source of similar data. Previously the overture bids accounted for around 12% of your keyword difficulty score, so having it removed is temporarily lowering all the scores until I get it fixed.

Does anyone know of a good tool for estimating search volume? I don't spend a lot of time in the SEO trenches so I figured asking our community for input would be the best route.

In the interim I am considering simply upping the weight of the page strength scores in the keyword difficulty formula. Running a keyword difficulty report looks at the top 10 ranking sites at Google and Yahoo! and calculates a page strength score for each. It then calculates the average page strength score and uses that as part of the formula for determining how difficult it is to rank for your target term. The average page strength scores account for around 33% of the total keyword difficulty score. With the page strength tool becoming more reliable since the new site launched, I think simply upping the weight of these scores to around 45% would make up for the loss of the over bid tool data. Again, this is an interim solution, ultimately I'd like to find a better factor for estimating search volume.

Regarding the Keyword Suggestion Tool, Loren reported that he talked to Yahoo and they say that it will not be going away, and if it does it will be replaced by a better tool, but not completely disappearing.

The free bid-trackers are trash. More than once before Yahoo dumped their services I did head to head comparisons and Yahoo showed ten times more searches for several keywords than WordTracker's system said were done, though I have no idea where wordtracker gets their stats.

Latest update - the Yahoo keyword selector tool is now showing stats that were frozen at the beginning of the year - they have not updated them since that time and this is a tremendous loss, given how poorly the alternatives do in showing real stats.

The Yahoo and Google popularity bar chart methods are terrible and offer no help whatever for someone such as myself - I am responsible for over 200 web sites SEO initiatives and most of them have refined keyword needs. These bar charts can appear to show the same value for two phrases when there could literally be thousands of more searches for one compared to the other given that the bars are only segmented into four segments.

I spoke directly with a Yahoo Search supervisor about a month ago (one of our clients spends $25,000 a month on PPC so I got in through a back door to talk with someone) - and they said that there is no specific info on if or when a new service would be offered that goes back to the hard number version for the selector tool and we're essentially stuck with having to do a three-step process to get bid estimates on individual words, and only through the existing client interface - so I have to log in under one of my existing client login accounts to do research even if that research is for a new client.

Yahoo and Google are pitiful when it comes to helping us in these areas, even though they can only benefit.

Uh, people do know the difference between bids and searches, right? :) There are many links to inventory-like tools here but I can find no suitable replacement for the old Overture bid tool which listed all advertisers' bids in order. Yahoo has gone with a quality weighing strategy (similar to Adwords QS) that deprioritises the importance of advertisers' max bids.

But knowing number of bids and bid prices is still invaluable to us.

The web-professor tool is now no longer valid; quote: "Bidstats no longer works as Yahoo has finally disabled the Overture Bid Tool completely."

This site seems to give Bid pertinent information... amongst other info :http://www.spyfu.com

Unfortunately I am looking for a keyword SEARCH Volume tool per market. Is access to information regressing instead of evolving on the internet? I would pay good money for the Overture keyword tool to come back, KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker fall way short of Overtur for what we need.

By Stock in yahoo... since the conversion of the vague bidding system google uses, our ad bill has gone up 100% with no new competitors or aggression. Simply, you can’t be sure what you are paying and Yahoo seems to have raised the costs arbitrarily to be more in line with CPC on google. Ad revenue for 1st quarter will be stellar.

Nadir, you are referring to the Keyword Selector Tool. The Keyword Bid Tool is the one that the SEOmoz used for its keyword difficulty tool. The tool asks for the top 3 Overture PPC bids which came from the Bid Tool, not the Keyword Selector.